Obama’s Supreme Court Win May Help Now More Than November

President Barack Obama told the American people: “The highest court in the land has now spoken.” Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Pool via Bloomberg

June 29 (Bloomberg) -- The most important U.S. Supreme
Court decision during a president’s re-election campaign may not
have fundamentally changed the dynamics of the 2012 race.

In the hours after the court upheld President Barack
Obama’s health-care law, both he and his Republican challenger,
Mitt Romney, retreated to previously stated positions: Romney
vowed to repeal and replace the law, while Obama touted its
attributes and warned of the consequences of repeal. They sought
to frame the issue in the larger context of what’s at stake for
voters and underscored the centrality of the economy in the
presidential election.

Still, the court handed the president a victory, averting a
rebuke of his defining legislative accomplishment and one that
eluded his Republican and Democratic predecessors for the last
100 years.

Its significance wasn’t lost on Obama who, looking into a
television camera, told the American people: “The highest court
in the land has now spoken.”

The setting -- the East Room of the White House -- has
served as a stage for statements at key moments in Obama’s
presidency, including his announcement of the May 2011 killing
of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“He avoided disaster and in the end reminded people that
this has not been a do-nothing presidency,” said Douglas
Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University in
Houston. “He ate up about 18 months of his honeymoon period on
this and now his Affordable Care Act has become a day-glow
accomplishment.”

Fight Continues

Yet health care remains one of the most divisive issues for
the electorate. Obama’s aides indicated he wouldn’t try to bask
in the court’s ruling, and Republicans hoped to capitalize on
the controversy surrounding the law.

“I think people recognize that if you want to replace
’Obamacare,’ you’ve got to replace President Obama,” Romney
told donors over breakfast this morning in midtown Manhattan.
“And the urgency of doing that is something which is
galvanizing people across the country.”

The court’s rationale for upholding the centerpiece of the
2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- a requirement
that most Americans obtain health insurance or pay a penalty --
also provided Republicans new ammunition for attacking Obama’s
pledge to protect the middle class from new taxes.

Taxing Authority

Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee who
wrote the majority opinion in the 5-4 ruling, said Congress had
the authority to impose the requirement under its power to levy
taxes.

“Obamacare raises taxes on the American people by
approximately $500 billion,” Romney said yesterday in
Washington as he reacted to the decision. “Obamacare cuts
Medicare -- cuts Medicare -- by approximately $500 billion. And
even with those cuts, and tax increases, Obamacare adds
trillions to our deficits and to our national debt and pushes
those obligations on to coming generations.”

Administration officials, briefing reporters on the
condition of anonymity after the ruling, said Obama and his
surrogates would make the case that the measure is a tax cut
because individuals will get tax credits to purchase health
care.

Unpopular Law

While the health-care law has now been validated, it
remains unpopular in polling, and Americans’ views haven’t
shifted in the more than two years since it was passed. Advisers
to Romney and Obama say that voters are more concerned about the
economy, and that barometers such as the June jobs report coming
next week are likely to carry more import for the November
election.

“It’s time for us to move forward, to implement and where
necessary improve on this law,” Obama said yesterday. “Now’s
the time to keep our focus on the most urgent challenge of our
time: putting people back to work, paying down our debt and
building an economy where people can have confidence that if
they work hard they can get ahead.”

For Obama’s campaign going forward, the law -- designed to
expand coverage to at least 30 million people and representing
the biggest change to the U.S. health system since Medicare and
Medicaid were established in 1965 -- will likely remain one of
the main accomplishments he lists in his appeal to voters, along
with equal pay for women and Wall Street reforms.

Voting ‘Pocketbooks’

“This is important, but in the end, I think they are still
going to go and vote their pocketbooks,” said David Redlawsk,
director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at
Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Roberts, whose confirmation Obama voted against as a U.S.
senator, joined four Democratic-selected justices to give the
the president a majority on a law that has divided the nation
along ideological and partisan lines.

The decision is the culmination of an epic legal fight that
featured the longest Supreme Court arguments in 44 years, a
record number of briefs and extraordinary public interest in a
high court case. The case tested both the constitutional powers
of Congress and the willingness of the Roberts court to overrule
the other two branches of the federal government.

The court did modify the law’s extension of the Medicaid
program for the poor by saying the federal government can’t
threaten to withhold existing money from states that don’t fully
comply.

Massachusetts Law

Romney’s own history with the individual mandate, however,
has complicated his argument against the law. As governor of
Massachusetts, Romney pushed to enactment a health-care measure
that also contained such a mandate. He has argued that while it
was right for his state, it is inappropriately applied
nationally.

Administration officials yesterday called Romney’s law
“the mirror image” of Obama’s and sought to paint Romney as
the original architect of the mandate-included national measure.

Like Obama, Romney will continue to address the health-care
issue through the prism of the jobs and the economy -- a tack
taken in the first TV ad by his campaign following the ruling.
Romney will argue the law is a drag on the economy and a top
concern of the business community, said Vin Weber, a former U.S.
representative from Minnesota and a Romney adviser.

“I think this gives Obama bragging rights for a couple
days, but I don’t think much longer than that,” Weber said.
“That jobs report will tell us more about strategy going
forward than the Supreme Court ruling, as important as it is and
as focused on it as we are today.”

Romney’s Challenges

Still, the decision presented the Romney campaign with
challenges.

His pledge to repeal a now-confirmed statute will intensify
questions about how he would cover the tens of millions of
uninsured people the law is designed to cover, including some
who have pre-existing medical conditions that could cause
insurers to deny them coverage if they were permitted to do so.

His campaign aides see no upside in providing such
specifics, believing that would only give Obama and Democrats a
political piñata to swing at, and are determined not to do so.

Fundraising Focus

Instead, they are using the court decision to stoke public
discontent with the health-care measure. Romney’s campaign put
the word out less than an hour after the announcement that it
had raised $100,000 in unsolicited donations. By this morning,
the total had jumped to $4.2 million, campaign spokeswoman
Andrea Saul said in a Twitter message.

Obama’s campaign, playing off the Romney fundraising
effort, attacked him over the lack of specifics he’s offered on
health policy.

“It’s perverse that Mitt Romney won’t share details about
what he’d do for the millions he’d leave uninsured or at the
whims of insurance companies when he ‘kills Obamacare dead,’ but
he’ll share the hourly details of his fundraising after the
Supreme Court ruling,” Ben LaBolt, press secretary for the
president’s re-election team, said in an e-mail today.

LaBolt also said, “We’ve outraised the Romney campaign in
that time period” after the decision, without providing
details.

Intense Opposition

A challenge for Obama is that “the intensity of opposition
to the law has always been stronger than the intensity of
support,” said Mollyann Brodie, director of the Kaiser Family
Foundation’s public opinion and media research.

Since its passage in March 2010, public opinion has skewed
consistently against the entire bill. Only 42 percent of
Americans had a favorable opinion of it, according to an April
poll from the Kaiser foundation, which tracks views of the
health-care law -- largely unchanged from the month after it was
signed in March 2010, when 46 percent favored the law.

Obama and other Democrats never effectively explained to
the American public how one of the most popular elements of the
law -- forcing insurers to cover people with pre-existing health
conditions -- is tied to the most unpopular provision: the
mandate that forces Americans to carry insurance or pay a
penalty.

Sixty percent of Americans favor the provision prohibiting
insurance companies from denying coverage because of a person’s
medical history -- yet 70 percent have an unfavorable opinion of
the mandate, according to the Kaiser poll.

“It’s a win on the leadership side, voters admire people
who get things done,” said Robert Blendon, a professor of
health policy and political analysis at Harvard University in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. “But you’re not going to shift a lot
of health policy voters. People who don’t like it will still not
like it, people who like it will still stay there.”